


Matinee

by ThrillingDetectiveTales



Series: Blockbuster [1]
Category: Suits (US TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, POV Outsider, not-quite-secretly married AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-10
Updated: 2019-03-10
Packaged: 2019-11-15 03:08:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18065432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThrillingDetectiveTales/pseuds/ThrillingDetectiveTales
Summary: When one of her fellow fifth year associates decides to make a pass at Harvey Specter, Saanvi finds the whole to-do objectively hilarious. She’s less clear as to why the firm’s long-time legal consultant seems equally amused.





	Matinee

**Author's Note:**

> Outsider POV is one of my favorite things and I wanted to play with some original characters, so I wrote this bit of silliness.
> 
> Not beta-read, as I don’t have a dedicated beta-reader.
> 
> Enjoy, even so!

“This is a bad idea.”

Tiffany doesn’t even bother looking over from where she’s adjusting herself in the mirror, lifting her cleavage and resettling it with a little shimmy, which is, Saanvi considers, fairly indicative of their relationship as a whole. She delivers timely and relevant advice while Tiffany ignores her wisdom in favor of stroking her own already massive ego.

Right on cue, Tiffany purses her lips at her reflection and coos, “It’s a great idea.”

“It’s really not,” Saanvi insists. Tiffany swipes at the corner of her mouth, frowns, and starts blotting delicately at her candy-apple red lipstick with a folded-up paper towel. “Mr. Specter is like, twenty years older than you. Minimum.”

“I’m aware,” Tiffany drawls, and this time she deigns to lift her gaze up to meet Saanvi’s in the mirror. She presses her straight, white teeth against the cushion of her lower lip and sighs dreamily. “Imagine how much sex you could have in twenty years. I bet he’s a _machine_ in the sack.”

“Imagine how many STIs you could get,” Saanvi shoots back, and Tiffany rolls her eyes. “Seriously, he could be your dad.”

“Don’t be gross,” Tiffany chides, lush mouth pulling into a dissatisfied mioue.

“I’m not the one planning to proposition my boss.”

“I’m not _propositioning_ him,” Tiffany corrects, digging a slightly battered tube of mascara from her purse. “I’m inviting him to lunch with me to celebrate my utter domination in Mock Trial.”

Saanvi rolls her eyes.

Tiffany won her case, sure, but only because she drew Danny from the associates pool, and for a fifth year associate at one of the top law firms in New York, Danny has all the ferocity of a baby giraffe. He’s a wizard with contracts but put the boy in front of a jury - even one made up entirely of his peers, most of whom actively  _like_ Danny and would prefer to stick it to Tiffany if given the opportunity - and he turns into a stuttering, quivering mess. And the _sweat_.

Saanvi’s no doctor, but she’s confident that there has to be a glandular problem there somewhere.

She thinks it’s worth noting that she won her case, too - pitted against Dionne, who’s the rising star of the fifth years by many varied metrics - and somehow managed to refrain from getting so high on her own vanity that it seems like a good idea to hit on one of the name partners during business hours. Not that she would have any interest in Mr. Specter even if she _was_ narcissistic enough to believe she had a shot with a name partner, though she will allow that he keeps it remarkably tight, for a man in his fifties.

“It’s all perfectly innocent,” Tiffany continues, swiping the mascara wand over her egregiously long lashes. She cuts Saanvi a dark, sly gaze, mouth quirking conspiratorially. “Though I wouldn’t turn down a lunchtime quickie if the,” pause, for erotic effect, “ _situation_ were to arise.”

Saanvi snorts.

“It’s going to blow up in your face,” she predicts, because she and Tiffany aren’t friends, so much as they are semi-affectionate antagonists in one another’s lives, “and I’m going to watch it all and laugh.”

“I do put on a good show,” Tiffany agrees, neatly sidestepping Saanvi’s sniping as she tosses her glossy blonde mane. She gathers it into a cascade of artful waves and arranges them over one shoulder, combing her fingers through and settling a few stray curls just so.

She really is lovely - tall and full-figured with a fine spray of girl-next-door freckles and big, tawny hazel eyes framed by sweeping lashes. Saanvi would probably be desperately into her, if her personality wasn’t basically irredeemable. Her ego is big enough to have its own gravitational pull, though Saanvi will freely admit that the bottomless wellspring of unearned confidence makes her an impressive and slightly terrifying litigator.

“You’re going to get fired,” Saanvi tries. Tiffany just scoffs.

“Please,” she says. “Have you met me?” She strokes carefully along the arc of one perfectly curved eyebrow. “Harvey isn’t going to know what hit him.”

“If you say so.” Saanvi shakes her head, digging her phone out of the pocket of her very tasteful pantsuit and dropping a message into the group chat that reads: _Code Red._  “How are you planning to get past his assistant?”

Tiffany smiles at her reflection, kicking up a heel and twining one sleek blonde coil around her finger, “I have my ways.”

 

 

***

 

 

Lou is already waiting in the lesser conference room by the time Saanvi gets there, and Seohyun shows up a spare thirty seconds later, carting a comically oversized bowl of microwave popcorn because she’s an actual goddess.

“What?” she says, totally unashamed. “Like we were supposed to watch this without snacks?”

“I love you,” Saanvi vows.

“Of course you do,” Seohyun agrees. “Now shut up, I don’t want to miss anything.”

It probably says something unkind about the three of them that their first course of action when Tiffany started making noises about acting on her doomed infatuation during their weekly Happy Hour was to suss out the prime spot from which to watch her crash and burn, but Saanvi can’t bring herself to care. They’re lawyers, they don’t have to be nice, especially when people invite ire unto themselves by acting like idiots.

Tiffany is lurking in the elevator bay, fiddling with her phone and casting the occasional, discreet glance in the direction of Mr. Specter’s office. Donna - at once one of the most heartrendingly beautiful and soul-crushingly terrifying women that Saanvi has ever had the supreme pleasure of meeting - is planted at her usual post. She appears to be doing something fairly involved on her computer, only very occasionally pausing to flash a quick look to where Mr. Specter is seated at his desk, leaning back in his rolling chair and frowning down at an impressive stack of papers.

There’s the gentle, tinkling knock of knuckles against glass and then a familiar voice says, “What’s the hot ticket, counselors?”

Mike Ross is a consultant who’s been on retainer with Specter Litt Zane since before Saanvi had even graduated high school. He’s a nice guy, somewhere in his forties and good-looking - better than usual today, in a suit so dark a green it’s nearly black, with a white linen shirt unbuttoned just as low as propriety will allow and no tie to speak of. His hair is short and barely tamed, a kind of muddy brown-blonde that works well with his fair complexion and crisp blue eyes. He’s a little on the scruffy side, but then he usually is, with a pair of classic black Ray Bans pushed up onto his head and an amiable grin curling his mouth.

He’s something of a silver fox in his own right, though he doesn’t have the distinguishing spray of grey at his temples or the impeccable taste in menswear that Mr. Specter does. If Saanvi were into older men - or men at all - she thinks someone like Mike would be more her speed.

“Hey, Mr. Ross,” she greets, because she knows he thinks it’s as funny as it is irritating that she always defaults to formality despite his open invitation to all Specter Litt Zane employees to refer to him as Mike.

“Saanvi,” Mike nods. “Seohyun, Lou.” He steps into the conference room and drops down into one of the chairs, slouching nonchalantly back and following the direction of their attention toward Mr. Specter’s office. “Are we creeping on Harvey for any reason in particular or is it just that slow a day?”

Both Lou and Seohyun shoot Saanvi nervous glances. If it were anyone else who’d stumbled in, they would undoubtedly already have had their asses handed to them for any number of reasons, not least of which might be disparaging the character of a senior partner by treating his imminent discomfort as their own weekday afternoon soap opera. Mike is different, though.

He rides the associates just as hard as Mr. Litt or Ms. Zane or even Mr. Specter himself, but he’s way more tolerant of inter-office shenanigans, so long as nobody’s getting hurt and no tarnish is cast upon the firm’s reputation. He seems to enjoy nothing more than needling at Mr. Specter between bouts of applying his dizzying intellect to the stickier issues that tend to spring up in the daily workings of a multibillion dollar corporate law firm, so there’s a fair chance he’ll let this indiscretion slide, if not participate outright.

Saanvi takes a gamble and admits, “One of the associates is about to make a run at him.”

Mike’s eyes go wide, the pleasant slope of his grin carving sharp with real delight.

“No shit?”

“I told her it was a bad idea,” Saanvi blurts. “But she didn’t listen, so.”

Mike laughs, a quick, joyful bark of sound, and crows, “Oh my God, I’m so glad I came in today!” He looks to Seohyun, the massive bowl of popcorn tucked into the curve of her elbow. “Hey, can I get in on that?”

Seohyun blinks at Saanvi and Lou, which is practically gaping with bewilderment for Seohyun, and shoves the bowl over so Mike can grab a handful.

“So who is it?” Mike asks, around a mouthful of popcorn. Lou flickers a questioning gaze at Saanvi, who shrugs a little helplessly, because she’s not sure what the protocol is for a situation like this, either.

“Tiffany,” Lou says after a moment of deliberation, dark eyes narrow behind her sharp cats-eye glasses. She points subtly to where the woman in question is still loitering amongst the elevators. “Over there.”

Mike follows the line of her finger and lifts his eyebrows in what Saanvi suspects might be approval. She feels vaguely queasy about that, because she’s always liked Mike for his aimlessly flirtatious personality and it would suck to discover that he’s secretly been one of those gross, predatory lechers who like to go after impressionable young ingenues the whole time.  Not that Tiffany meets any of those qualifications except ‘young,’ but the sentiment stands, especially because of the tasteful platinum band that Mike is always absently fiddling with.

Thankfully, all that Mike says is, “How is she going to get past Donna?”

Saanvi shrugs and shakes her head. “She said she had a plan for that but she didn’t give me any details.”

Mike snorts and says ominously, “Brave woman.”

There’s a gentle buzz and he pulls his cellphone out of his pocket, smiling down at it for a second, close-mouthed, and tapping out a response in a rapid burst of motion.

“It’s not going to work,” Lou offers. “Donna knows everything, no way is she letting Tiffany in there to waste Mr. Specter’s time.”

Mike makes a politely disagreeable humming noise.

“You don’t think so?” Lou asks, surprised. Mike shrugs, helping himself to more popcorn and drumming his fingers against the conference table.

“Donna knows everything,” he concedes, and then his grin goes wicked, “but she also likes to watch Harvey squirm.”

Saanvi supposes that none of them can cast stones on that front, since they’re assembled in an empty conference room for almost exactly the same reason. After a few seconds of silent contemplation, Mike smiling enigmatically all the while, the associates watch in awe as Donna answers a phone call, effects an overdramatic  expression of frantic concern, and takes off for the elevators at a swift walk.

Tiffany waits until Donna has stepped into one of the cars - even going so far as to wave her in with a polite smile, the diabolical monster - and then darts in the direction of Mr. Specter’s office. Before the doors slide closed, Saanvi would swear that Donna looks right at Mike and flashes him a wink.

She glances over to Lou and Seohyun, wondering if they caught it or if she’s hallucinating, but both are engrossed in watching Tiffany, paused at Donna’s desk and blatantly taking measures to psych herself up. Mike looks over at her and arches an eyebrow. Saanvi narrows her eyes, suspicious, and turns her attention back to the spectacle at hand.

Tiffany knocks on Mr. Specter’s door and pokes her head in. He looks up from his paperwork, scowl pulling tighter when he sees who, precisely, is interrupting his workflow. Mr. Specter doesn’t harbor any special fondness for the associates as a whole, and he makes an effort to actively discourage their use of the firm’s open-door policy as it applies to his time and attention, so he’s clearly displeased to see Tiffany standing there.

To her credit, Tiffany lets his disgruntled confusion slide right off and slinks her way inside. She proffers a case file that Saanvi hadn’t seen she had tucked under an arm, saying something with the bright, broad smile that’s been such a useful weapon in her arsenal during client negotiations in the past. Mr. Specter stares her down for a long, still moment and then beckons her forward to take the file with the irritated air of a man who would rather be doing almost literally anything else.

“She’s gonna get fired,” Seohyun murmurs, low and absent like she hadn’t even meant to say it aloud. Mike snorts.

“Harvey’s way too vain to fire someone for having the good sense to find him attractive,” he assures. He pauses, considering. “I’m betting she doesn’t know that he’s married?”

Saanvi has never before had a strong affinity for the word ‘gobsmacked,’ but she thinks in this moment that no other term could accurately capture the sheer breadth of the shock, awe, and horror reeling wildly through her. Lou’s eyes are wide, mouth dropped open, and Seohyun looks dangerously close to actually emoting.

“Mr. Specter is married?” Saanvi croaks. Mike nods.

“Yeah, for like,” he does a quick mental calculation and then huffs a slightly bewildered laugh, “six years, almost. Damn.”

Seohyun is clutching the edge of the conference table with an expression of white-knuckled terror, which, for her, means that her brow is gently furrowed and her shoulders have gone a little tight.

“He doesn’t wear a ring.”

Mike rolls his eyes, affectionate, and avails himself of further snacks.

“Not at work,” he confirms. “Unless he thinks it’s going to get him leverage with a client.”

Saanvi frowns. “Doesn’t that bother his wife?”

Mike laughs again, an amused little gust through his nose. “Are you kidding? It’s such a textbook Harvey Specter move, it’s hilarious.”

In the office, Tiffany has sidled up to Mr. Specter’s desk, leaning casually over it with all her weight on one leg, the toe of her other shoe digging gently into the carpeting. Her hair is falling in a golden curtain, shot through with buttery midday light, and Saanvi has to give her this: she knows how to present herself to showcase her best assets. Mr. Specter, still engaged with whatever brief she carted along to give herself plausible deniability, does not appear to notice this in the least. Saanvi wonders how angry he’s going to be when he picks up on her monstrously unsubtle cues and almost, maybe starts to feel a little bad for Tiffany.

“She has no idea he’s married,” Saanvi says miserably, shaking her head. “None of us did!”

“That’s how Harvey likes it,” Mike soothes, settling a little of the sudden tension shrouding the room. “He’s not going to bite her head off for not knowing his personal business, trust me.”

“You don’t seem very concerned by all this,” Lou observes. Mike grins at her.

“Should I be?”

“I just mean,” Lou backpedals, looking like she wishes desperately she hadn’t spoken, “isn’t this weird, for you? You and Mr. Specter go way back, right?”

“Sure,” Mike agrees. “He’s basically the whole reason I got into law in the first place.”

There’s something sly about his grin as he says it that Saanvi can’t quite pin down.

“And you know his wife, right?” Lou presses.

Mike bites down on his lip like he’s trying not to burst into laughter. It’s a strange enough reaction that it pricks Saanvi’s attention, some vague and unformed theory slowly starting to coalesce in the back of her mind.

“I definitely do.”

“So, it’s not even a _little_ uncomfortable for you to watch random women throwing themselves at him?”

Mike thinks about this for a second and then fishes around for another fistful of popcorn.

“Not really,” he says with a shrug. “It happens all the time. Harvey’s pretty good at deflecting by now.”

In the office, Mr. Specter appears to be slowly understanding that Tiffany didn’t drop by solely to procure his legal expertise. She’s practically bent double over the desk, and Mr. Specter has leaned back in his chair, shifting subtly away. A distant and muddled part of that growing suspicion starts to solidify. Saanvi swallows around a thick knot of apprehension, and forces herself to speak.

“Don’t you ever worry? You know, that he’ll - ” Her voice dissolves, but Mike follows her thought without issue.

“Harvey?” he scoffs, amused. “Never. He has some pretty inflexible opinions on extramarital affairs.”

“Wow,” Lou breathes, sounding just as untethered as Saanvi feels. Seohyun has been frowning silently to herself long enough that Saanvi suspects she’s trying her hardest to completely reboot her brain. “Harvey Specter is married. This is kind of blowing my mind right now.”

Mike just grins and noshes merrily on his handful of popcorn. Saanvi studies him for a long moment, significantly more interested in his cheery laissez-faire and apparently encyclopedic knowledge of Harvey Specter’s romantic inner workings than in whatever ill-conceived move Tiffany is implementing in the office.

Saanvi likes Mike. He was one of the first people at Specter Litt Zane to talk to her like expending conversation in her presence wasn’t a waste of billables, and they’d bonded some months before when Saanvi, sleep deprived during the final miserable throes of an all-nighter that had everyone from paralegals to name partners scouring boxes of documents in an endless slog, had stumbled into the hallway for some coffee and a quick trip to the restroom only to overhear Mike and Mr. Specter quietly outlining a particularly gruesome plan of attack, to be implemented in the occasion that nobody was able to turn up the piece of evidence for which they were all desperately searching before the approaching deadline.

Pushing thirty-two hours without sleep and suddenly confronted with her most buttoned-up boss, undone to the waistcoat and entertaining a system of legal recourse that toed the line of disgraceful immorality, it had made perfect sense at the time to announce, “Mr. Spock, you’re the most cold-blooded man I’ve ever known.”

Both Mike and Mr. Specter had stared, and then Mike had collapsed into low, bitten back giggles and wheezed, “Why thank you, doctor.”

He’d been red-eyed with exhaustion and punch drunk, wobbling like the only thing keeping him from toppling to the floor was the arm that Mr. Specter had casually slung around his waist. Mr. Specter hadn’t said anything, but he has a tendency to nod at her in the hallways, now, which Saanvi has elected to take as evidence that she’d thawed him a little bit with her poorly timed Star Trek reference, too.

So Mike is nice, certainly, and smarter than anyone else that Saanvi has ever met in her life, though he mostly manages to stay humble about it, but he’s also devious. It’s easy to forget, with his amiable nature and bright, infectious laughter, but he and Mr. Specter are more alike than they are different, despite how disparate they may seem on the surface.

“Forget fired,” Lou mutters. “Tiff’s gonna get arrested.”

Saanvi snaps her gaze back to Mr. Specter’s office - he’s still sitting in his chair, with his hands raised and his arms spread wide like he’s being held at gunpoint. He’s also still scowling, which seems to be his baseline expression, but his brown eyes are wider than normal and there’s a tightness to his jaw that makes him look distinctly hunted. Saanvi is used to seeing it on the lower year associates and paralegals whenever Tiffany is trying to charm them into - or out of - something. It’s out of place on Mr. Specter, who has always seemed relatively unflappable.

Tiffany has moved around to lean her hip on the short side of his desk, one hand braced against its surface and the other sliding delicately up one of Mr. Specter’s lapels while his eyebrows climb steadily toward his hairline.

“Gotta give her credit for courage,” Mike observes. He’s still smirking when Saanvi risks a glance in his direction, though his eyes have darkened somewhat. He tilts his head back, popping a few kernels into his mouth. “And I can’t fault her taste.”

His wedding band is very bright under the glare of the fluorescent lights, sleek and elegant and lovingly tended. Saanvi’s mind spins, grinds, and snaps back into place.

She immediately starts laughing, delight and disbelief bubbling out of her in a breathless, elated geyser. Saanvi buries her face in her hands to stifle it, even as Lou and Seohyun whip toward her, staring like she’s gone mad. She feels a little like she might have actually lost her mind, but she manages to stammer an apology past her sudden fit of giggles, assuring, “It’s nothing, really, sorry. I just understood something, that’s all.”

Her potentially deteriorating mental fortitude is clearly less interesting than whatever Tiffany is doing because her friends shift their attention back over to Mr. Specter’s office with very little encouragement.

Saanvi peers past her fingers to see Mike grinning approvingly at her, eyes sharp and knowing. She purses her lips against a smile and shakes her head at him, mouthing, “You?”

He shrugs, grabs blindly for another handful of popcorn, and sprawls so far back in his seat that Saanvi worries for a second he’ll topple over, looking as smug and satisfied as a cat in sunshine.

Back in the office, Mr. Specter has taken to his feet, herding Tiffany around to the appropriate side of his desk. The back of his neck is tinged red against the sharp white edge of his shirt collar and his face is stern, though less abjectly furious than Saanvi might have anticipated. He’s saying something, but Saanvi is nowhere near good enough at lip reading to even guess what it may be.

Tiffany has splotches of pink in her cheeks and creeping down her throat, but she’s meeting Mr. Specter’s gaze unflinchingly and nodding every now and again - embarrassed, maybe, but not cowed by any stretch of the imagination.

“Okay, this is too painful,” Lou says, rising to her feet. “I can’t watch anymore, I’m tapping out. I’ll catch you guys later.”

She gives herself a little shake, like she can shimmy her anxieties off, and dips a nod to Mike.

“Good to see you, Mr. Ross.”

Mike offers her a shallow wave and Lou slips out the far door, casting curious glances over her shoulder even as she retreats. Seohyun sticks it out until Mr. Specter is guiding Tiffany to the door, one arm hovering behind her without making contact.

“I don’t want to get stuck on proofing duty when he catches us watching him,” she mutters, standing gracefully and smoothing her skirt down her thighs. She points from Mike to the nearly-empty bowl of popcorn. “That mess is yours, now.”

“Hey, what - ” Mike starts, but Seohyun is already halfway into the hall.

“Consider it a gift,” she says, without turning around. Saanvi watches her go and tries not to let too much wistful adoration show.

“That woman is a menace,” Mike grumbles, but he’s smiling as he pulls the bowl of popcorn into the protective curve of his elbow.

Saanvi stretches awkwardly across the table to grope for a handful.

“Six years, huh?” she asks, in as blandly polite a tone as she can manage.

Mike grins, softer and fonder than she’s used to seeing, and tilts his head. “Give or take a few months.”

Saanvi is distantly aware of Mr. Specter pulling the door to his office open and ushering Tiffany out through it. She sashays confidently down the hall despite her still-mottled complexion, hips swinging and hair bouncing, and when she sees Saanvi sitting with Mike, she doesn’t even break her stride, just blows Saanvi a kiss and continues on her merry way. Saanvi retracts every scrap of pity she was beginning to cultivate and snorts unattractively, rolling her eyes.

Tiffany will be just fine.

“Oh, shit,” Mike mumbles, and Saanvi turns to see Mr. Specter stalking toward the conference room, expression shuttered and mouth turned down. There’s no time to flee, so she straightens her posture, stomach tightening against the sudden, nauseous wave of anxiety that drifts through her, and begins to mentally redraft her resumé.

Mr. Specter yanks the door open without finesse, eyes flicking dismissively over Saanvi before coming to rest, hot and dark, on Mike. He opens his mouth to say something, but his gaze catches on the popcorn bowl Mike is cradling against his chest and he snaps it shut again, face screwing up in the most deeply unimpressed grimace Saanvi has ever seen.

“We have a reservation at Giordano’s in twenty minutes,” Mr. Specter says, tone heavy with judgment.

Mike grins and licks his fingers.

“I was coerced,” he says. Mr. Specter glances over to Saanvi, who affects her most adorable look of innocence and shakes her head.

“Stop trying to pin your bad life decisions on the one associate I don’t loathe,” Mr. Specter chides. Saanvi very carefully does not preen at his description.

He steps into the room and lets the door fall shut behind him, silent on its metered spring. He sidles up to where Mike is sitting, standing between the spread of Mike’s knees with just enough distance that it doesn’t seem untoward, though Saanvi can see from the tension in his posture how badly he wants to close that gap, now that she knows to look.

“I assume you’ve been in here spectating for the last fifteen minutes?”

“I was considering it more like foreplay.” Mike wags his eyebrows and it’s all Saanvi can do not to start laughing hysterically into her hands.

Mr. Specter flashes another brief glance over at her and Saanvi smiles, close-mouthed and hopefully less manic than she feels. From the way he sighs, long-suffering but faintly amused, her emotional state is coming through loud and clear.

“You told?” he asks Mike, arching an eyebrow. He doesn’t seem upset, just a little surprised, maybe. It’s painfully clear that they keep their relationship under tight lock and key in their professional circles, and for just a second Saanvi’s heart aches at the thought.

Mike shakes his head, sounding inordinately proud when he corrects, “She figured it out.”

Mr. Specter looks at her again, approving and intent.

“I trust we can count on your discretion?”

Instead of responding as she should - which is to say, verbally, with cool and eloquent professional assurance - Saanvi brings her fingers to her lips and mimes twisting a key in a lock, before throwing it over her shoulder. She sits there, mortified, for a split second, until a wide grin splits Mr. Specter’s face, eyes crinkling as he huffs a laugh.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, soft-edged and sweet in a way she’s never heard him before, “it’s like dealing with you all over again.”

The gaze he turns on Mike is so tender it makes Saanvi’s chest hurt. Mike stretches one leg out, nudging his ankle against Mr. Specter’s, and beams up at him with narrow, playful eyes.

“Guess I oughta be glad it wasn’t Saanvi making a blatant pass at you, then, huh?”

“Gross,” Saanvi blurts.

There’s a moment of frozen, awkward silence while Saanvi’s face floods with horrified heat, and then Mike throws his head back and starts cackling. Mr. Specter is staring at the ceiling like someone will teleport him away if he just believes hard enough.

“I’m so sorry!” Saanvi stammers. “I didn’t mean - it’s not you, you’re very attractive for a man of your age!” Mr. Specter’s jaw clenches and Mike is laughing too hard to catch his breath, eyelashes wet. Whatever signal Saanvi’s brain is supposed to send to get her mouth to quit flapping is clearly on the fritz, because she continues despite herself. “Which is not to say you’re old, or anything! You’re very spry and I’m sure plenty of women are into that, not that it matters because you’re married, I’m just super gay, and - ”

Mr. Specter holds up a hand. Saanvi bites her own lip so hard she’ll be surprised if it isn’t bleeding.

“Ms. Goswami?” he says. Saanvi, probably wisely, doesn’t trust herself to open her mouth, so she makes what she hopes is an appropriately attentive sound of query from behind her teeth. “Go back to work.”

Saanvi scrambles to her feet and books it toward the far door, chair spinning in the sudden slipstream of her momentum. Behind her, Mike is still laughing, though his torrent of humor has ebbed to a breathless trickle, and Mr. Specter is murmuring something in too low a tone for Saanvi to make out his words.

When she risks a final, brief glance over her shoulder, it’s to see Mr. Specter slotted neatly between Mike’s thighs with his palms cradling Mike’s face, gazing down on him with such naked adoration that Saanvi is awash with a sudden, vicious desire to go out and find the same for herself.

She rounds a corner and stops to lean on the wall, catching her breath and centering herself while she mulls over a newly-forming idea. After a few long seconds she straightens up, tugging the hem of her jacket into place, and tosses her hair, considering.

Tiffany is a creature of immense vanity so Saanvi is willing to bet she’s holed up in the nearest ladies’ room, attempting to soothe the blotchiness from her complexion with cold water before too many people see her at less than her best. She rolls her shoulders, cracks her neck, and strides off in that direction. Tiffany likes winning, but Saanvi thinks she might be able to convince her that she likes fighting more.

Besides, they both deserve a victory lunch, at the very least, and there’s a place around the corner that does a life-changing bibimbap and lychee martinis strong enough to seal the shame of the last twenty minutes within the hazy realm of memory, where it belongs.

If she plays her cards right, Saanvi considers, already gleefully plotting her next ten moves, she might even be able to con Tiffany into paying.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> I am on Tumblr as [@rrrebeccabee](https://rrrebeccabee.tumblr.com) if you’d like to come scream at me about idiot lawyers in love.
> 
>  **ETA:** I did a [quick doodle of Tiffany](https://rrrebeccabee.tumblr.com/post/183456341607/the-other-day-i-wrote-a-short-fic-i-really-like) in case anyone was curious as to how I pictured her.


End file.
